Monthly Archives: February 2007

Firefox the movie

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but possibly not what you think.

It’s a movie from the 1980s, based on a novel with the same name and starring Clint Eastwood, about a plot to steal a very technologically advanced Soviet fighter jet. So advanced that its weapon targeting system keys off the thoughts of the pilot. “Wow, I’m hungry. Is that a Carl’s Jr. down there? Ka pow! Oops…”. Maybe some future version of Firefox will close a browser tab when I think about it.

Flash and Firefox CPU usage

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I noticed today that Firefox 2.0 on my PowerBook was suddenly incredibly slow. First, I suspected my own code. After I couldn’t think of anything that I had done recently that could possibly cause this, I tried uninstalling half a dozen extensions to no avail. Finally, I found the culprit.

This page often shows a Flash ad (“Pick hot stocks. Win a cool million”) that instantly causes Firefox 2.0 on my PowerBook to use 60-80% of the CPU. Maybe it’s just this Flash ad or maybe it’s all of them to one degree or another. Either way, I don’t care.
Goodbye, Flash. Thanks for playing.

Interestingly, after uninstalling Flash and going back to that page, I still saw that same ad. Turns out that the page detects if you don’t have Flash and if you don’t, it serves up a plain old JPEG file. The JPEG looks exactly the same except that it doesn’t have a moving background. Big freaking deal. I’ll trade some subtle animation effects to get my CPU back.

Boston: Those advertisements are not da bomb

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Chill

First of all, they’ve been in cities all over the country for 3 weeks. Why the sudden hysteria?

Second, if you were making a bomb, would you attach it to an illuminated image and then put them in places where people would readily see them? Would you put the battery on the outside?

The funniest thing of all is that I mentioned to my wife the other day that they looked like Lite Brites to me and then later saw that the Wikipedia page says that they indeed are. Yes, Lite Brites. A toy from the 1980s. What’s next? Anthrax-laden Colorforms?

Blog posting via Emacs?

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I’ve never really gotten into the WYSIWYG HTML editor (TinyMCE) that comes with WordPress. It’s an impressive application of DHTML, but for blog posting I don’t need a ton of fancy formatting and would rather have something lightweight, fast, and keyboard-oriented. Like for instance, Emacs.

Do you post to your blogs using Emacs? What package(s) do you use?

-1:--   blog\_with\_emacs      (XHTML) --L0--C0-----------------------------------------------
M-x post-to-blog

Yes, these CSS styles are a blatantly ripped off and then hacked version of the stuff from http://emacsen.org/.